


kill him (with a kiss)

by clairdeloune



Category: BBC Radio 1 RPF, One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M, Misunderstandings, Uni AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-25 18:05:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16202810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clairdeloune/pseuds/clairdeloune
Summary: The first time Nick speaks to Louis, it’s almost two in the morning, he’s pretty much delirious from trying to stay on top of both work and uni and spending the last three nights attempting to write an essay, and Louis is discussing his plans to murder someone.





	kill him (with a kiss)

**Author's Note:**

> this was supposed to be a tiny drabble that turned into 3k of ridiculousness. i'm not sorry.
> 
> for M. who sent me the prompt, i hope you enjoy it! and as always thank you to Amber for reading this over and being supportive of all the shit i randomly decide to write. <3

The first time Nick speaks to Louis, it’s almost two in the morning, he’s pretty much delirious from trying to stay on top of both work and uni and spending the last three nights attempting to write an essay, and Louis is discussing his plans to murder someone.

He’s seen Louis around before; although he’s a year below Nick, he’s somewhat of a well-known figure amongst most of the students in the English Department. He has relatively good grades, is involved in the student life, and throws some of the best parties. He’s also a friend of Harry’s, who in turn is an annoying thorn in Nick’s side who somehow stumbled into his life in high school and never left after that. He and Louis have never actually had a proper conversation, though, and this is definitely not how Nick imagined it going.

“Uh,” he says, as two pairs of wide, startled eyes look up at him. He’s holding a cup of coffee in one hand, and a book that probably weighs more than all of his groceries from this week combined, in another. He reckons having the attention of two murderers-in-the-making on himself should make him feel more nervous, but he’s pretty sure he stopped caring around three hundred words ago.

“You weren’t supposed to hear that,” Louis says, trying to gather all the random pieces of paper from all around the table. Nick still manages to catch the ‘ _the most effective ways to kill someone_ ’ and ‘ _the most painful causes of death_ ’ scribbled on top of two of them. “What are you doing here at this hour?”

Louis really has the gall to ask him that, when he’s sitting in a public library discussing the best ways to commit murder.

“I’m writing an essay,” Nick replies anyway. He’s not sure why he’s still standing here. He doesn’t recognize the girl sitting with Louis, but he tries his best to stealthily memorise some of her most prominent features, in case he’s ever asked to testify about Tomlinson and his partner in crime. He thinks it might be a lot less subtle and a lot more like he’s checking her out than he was aiming for, considering the way she raises her eyebrows at him. He quickly turns back to Louis. “What about you?”

As soon as the words leave his mouth, Nick wants to slap himself. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to have any part in that.

“Oh, nothing.” The answer comes way too quickly and is also such an obvious lie, even Tomlinson himself seems to want to roll his eyes at it. “I mean, y’know. Just boring uni stuff.”

“Right.” Nick nods. He doesn’t remember any of his second year classes requiring discussions of different ways to kill someone or wondering how far the blood would splash if you stabbed one of the main arteries. Sure, he might’ve briefly thought about how much he hated professor Clark’s entire existence, but it never turned into anything more than desperate thoughts at four in the morning, when he had at least two more paragraphs to write, and only three hours left before his alarm clock. “That’s—I guess I’ll leave you to it?”

He goes back to his desk and drops in the seat, staring at the opened document on the computer screen. The library is quiet; he thinks there are a few more people in different sections suffering over their own coursework, but it doesn’t change how fucking weird he feels about the whole thing that’s just happened.

“You’re actually going crazy,” he mutters to himself, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes, hard enough for spots to dance in front of them when he blinks again.

 _why are you friends with criminals_ , he sends to Harry, and isn’t surprised when he gets a reply almost instantly; Harry’s mentioned something about a party, which in the middle of the week usually means staying up all night and stumbling into his classes either hungover or still drunk, depending on how early they start. Nick’s too old for this crap.

 _they make life more exciting_ , the text reads, and Nick honestly doesn’t know what else he was expecting.

\---

For the most part, Nick forgets about it. He’s busy with his shifts at the café and doing the radio gig twice a week, and on top of that all of his professors seem to have chosen the same month to bury them under piles of assignments. He has his own life and he doesn’t have time to think about Tomlinson’s. And besides, at this point he’s halfway convinced he has simply imagined the whole thing.

That’s why, of course, he stumbles onto Louis tying some kind of bloody complicated knot on Harry’s wrists not even two weeks later.

“What the fuck,” he blurts out, because that’s definitely not something he was expecting to see in his flat at four in the afternoon on a Thursday. There’s some kind of material in Harry’s mouth, preventing him from speaking, and he seems to want to wave at Nick as soon as he sees him, until he remembers his hands are stuck behind his back.

At first, Louis doesn’t even pay him any mind. He’s frowning down at the knot he must’ve made himself and then glances at his phone, which—Nick notices it’s set to a timer. His head spins.

“It takes too long,” Louis mutters to himself, so quietly Nick can barely hear him. “It takes too long to break in and then do all this detailed work, someone will realise…” He trails off and sighs, and does something to the rope that makes it magically fall from Harry’s wrists in one swift motion. He looks almost apologetic when he notices the faint marks it’s left on his skin. “Sorry, H, put some ointment on that, yeah? Oh,” he adds, finally noticing that Nick’s standing in the doorway, “Hello.”

“Don’t worry, Lou, I’ve dealt with bruises like those before,” Harry replies when he takes off the makeshift gag, a cheeky smile on his face. Louis snorts.

“What the fuck,” Nick repeats, wondering if he’s maybe fallen asleep during class again and this is all some fucked up dream his brain conjured up from pure exhaustion. He pinches himself, not even trying to be subtle about it, and continues standing there when nothing happens. What kind of alternative universe did he step into, he’d love to know. With a detailed instruction on how to get out of it, too, preferably.

When Harry opens his mouth to speak again, Nick holds up his hand.

“You know what. I don’t want to know. Please keep your kinks to yourself, thanks.”

He takes one more look at the coffee table, almost faints when he sees a knife lying there, and makes a beeline for his bedroom.

\---

“So,” he starts casually a few days later, when he and Harry are in the kitchen together, “are you and Tomlinson fucking?”

Harry laughs so hard he doubles over and proceeds to pat Nick on the shoulder. He leaves without giving him an answer, still giggling to himself.

\---

The next few times he sees Tomlinson, nothing groundbreaking happens. Once, he sees Louis in the library again, but he’s so focused on furiously writing something on his laptop, Nick doesn’t even stop to say hi. Another time, he stumbles into Nick’s café, bleary-eyed and pretty much dead on his feet, and orders a coffee with so much caffeine in it, Nick worries he might actually drop dead on the spot as soon as the liquid reaches his lips. The first time they have a proper conversation is when Harry invites Louis over for a movie night, which turns into Louis and Nick complaining about one of their professors, one Nick thankfully doesn’t have to deal with anymore, and discussing their most hated writers. They sneak out on the balcony for a smoke when Harry eventually falls asleep, and as Louis quietly tells him about his younger siblings and how the twins wrote him a short story for his birthday because they know he loves reading, Nick almost forgets Louis is a murderer-to-be. The feeling keeps fading the more time they spend together and nothing weird happens again.

Until, of course, one day it does.

Louis drops into the seat opposite Nick. “What do you think is the best way to hide a body?”

“Hello to you too,” Nick replies before Louis’ question fully registers in his brain. He pauses with his cup of tea raised halfway to his lips. “Wait, _what_?”

“The best way to hide a body,” Louis repeats, frown set into place. He’s fiddling with his phone, and it looks like he keeps typing and erasing something. “Would you call someone? Would you do it on your own? Burning? Acid? Burying? Cutting it up?”

“I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it,” Nick says carefully. He suddenly remembers Louis’ voice that night in the library whispering _how many times do you think you have to stab someone to kill them?_ “Why?”

Ignoring his question, Louis goes on. “I mean, you’d want to leave as little trace of it as possible, right? But at the same time you need to take into consideration how much time you have, as well as the available resources.” He taps the screen of his phone a few more times as Nick just stares at him, opening his mouth with a bunch of questions swimming around his brain, before asking himself if he really wants to know, and closing it.

Maybe he should just ask Harry instead.

“Okay,” Louis says, standing up as abruptly as he showed up. “I need to discuss this with Perrie. I’ll see you around, yeah?”

He leaves without waiting for Nick to reply, eyes still glued to the screen.

Nick has no idea what he’s ever done to deserve this.

\---

“Harry,” he asks that evening, as they’re watching the reruns of The Great British Bake Off, “What were you and Louis doing with that whole… rope thing a while back?”

“Louis was trying to figure out how long you could take with tying someone up if you only had a limited amount of time to kill them,” Harry says, as if that’s the most normal thing in the world. Maybe Nick should consider Harry’s sanity, too.

“And what did he find out?”

“That he has to keep working on his knots,” Harry tells him and _winks_.

“You’re fucking useless,” Nick groans and throws a pillow at him.

\---

Louis is—he’s funny and terribly charming and so sarcastic he could give Nick a run for his money. He’s passionate about reading and writing and, surprisingly, can keep up with Nick’s chatter about music and the radio in a way not many people can. Nick’s smitten enough to forgive him for the boring lectures about football and somehow being able to drink countless pints despite them tasting like piss whenever Nick’s drunk enough to try and taste them.

That, and the whole planning a murder thing. Because it doesn’t stop there. One time Nick asks to use Louis’ laptop to check one of the references he’s using for his essay, and finds himself staring at an article about different kinds of torture.

It’s not like—it’s not like he seriously thinks Louis is a murderer, obviously. He would be a lot more concerned and probably would’ve already talked to someone about it if that was the case, but the whole thing is just—it’s fucking _weird_ and he’s not even sure if he actually wants to know. He realises that apparently it doesn’t even matter when they go clubbing together one Friday, his and Louis’ groups of friends mixing together effortlessly. As he watches Louis start dancing with some random guy and completely lose himself in the music and the body pressed close to his, he feels an incredibly strong urge to go out there and replace the guy’s hands on Louis’ waist with his own, and thinks _fuck_.

Fuck.

“My dick doesn’t care about my well-being,” he complains to Aimee when he’s at least five drinks in and Louis has disappeared somewhere in the crowd. He can still see Harry from where he’s sitting, shamelessly flirting with some guy who’s looking at him like Harry’s put the stars in the sky, so Nick’s assuming he’s not coming home tonight. “Can I stay at yours?”

“I won’t take care of your dick,” she says, but not even half an hour later she drags him to a cab and lets him crawl into her bed and curl up into her side.

In the morning, she tells him, “For what it’s worth, Tomlinson kept undressing you with his eyes even when he was dancing with someone else,” and Nick turns pink before muttering something about having a class to get to and leaving with toast in his mouth and a quiet _thanks_ , ignoring Aimee’s amused, “It’s a bloody Saturday, you idiot.”

\---

The thing is, the more time he spends with Louis, the more he finds himself fancying the brat, so one day when they’re hanging out at Louis’ flat again and Nick finds the same notes Louis was hiding from him in the library that first night, he turns around to face him and finally asks, “Are you planning to murder someone?”

He doesn’t know what reaction he was expecting, but Louis looking up from some poem he has to interpret and must have read at least thirty times by now to grumble, “Does myself count?” turns out to be a bit anticlimactic.

“I’m being serious,” Nick presses, stealing the book from Louis when he ignores him. “Are you or are you not?”

“What the—What the hell, Nick, why would I murder someone? What are you talking about? Give it back, I need to finish it tonight or I’m going to fucking fail the class.”

“You’re not going to fail the class,” Nick says, because he knows that as much as Louis hates it, he’s got good enough grades to make some of the other students envious. “Well, you might, if the police find out you’re planning a murder in your free time.”

“Can you just explain what you’re on about and let me suffer in silence?”

“This!” Nick lifts up the papers so Louis can see what’s written on them. “Your weird questions and websites and the whole thing with Harry and seeing how long it would take to _tie someone up_ —"

“I’m—What the fuck. I’m writing a _book_ , why the fuck did you think I—” Nick watches, helpless, as the corners of Louis’ eyes crinkle up as he starts to laugh. “Did you… did you actually think I was going to bloody _murder_ someone?” He sounds incredulous and terribly amused at the same time, and Nick hates how _fond_ he feels despite his embarrassment.

“Well, I don’t know! How was I supposed to know?” Nick demands, his face hot. Looking back, it makes sense, of course, a lot more sense than Louis suddenly turning out to be a killer, but—well. Nick doesn’t really have excuses, besides maybe watching a few too many _Criminal Minds_ episodes and an overactive imagination. “Since when are you writing a book? And why are you writing a book like _that_?”

Louis shrugs. “A short story for my creative writing class turned into a fully-fledged idea? It’s really cool and interesting. Did you know that the fastest way to kill someone—”

Nick interrupts him before he has the chance to finish. “I do not need to know that,” he says. “Please keep your research to yourself. I’m forever scarred. Why the fuck did you hide your notes from me that time in the library?”

“It was a _secret_ ,” Louis says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and maybe it is. “Why didn’t you just _ask_ me?”

Nick scoffs. “Why would I ask a murderer if he was planning to murder someone? So you could put me on your hit list?”

Louis raises one of his eyebrows. “So what changed that you decided to ask now?” When Nick stubbornly doesn’t answer, Louis adds, “You didn’t really think I was planning to murder people, right? Please tell me you didn’t.”

“It was just weird, alright!” Nick sulks, resisting the urge to hide his face in his hands. “I didn’t think you would actually _kill_ someone. I was just… concerned.”

“I can’t believe—Harry’s going to piss himself laughing,” Louis says gleefully. Nick groans. He doesn’t even want to imagine.

“Is there anything I can do to stop you from telling him?” he asks, though he doesn’t have much hope. He’s pretty sure that seeing Nick suffer is one of Louis’ favourite things to do.

Louis just looks at him for a moment, before the corner of his lips quirks up. “You can buy me coffee.”

“I buy you coffee all the time,” Nick protests, because he’s seriously surprised he hasn’t been fired yet, considering how many times he’s given Louis a discount, or somehow managed to get a free cup of coffee for him. He doesn’t get that much free coffee himself, and he bloody _works_ there.

Louis doesn’t even blink. “I know,” he says and doesn’t elaborate. After a few seconds, it clicks.

“Oh,” Nick says. He flushes. “Right. Buy you coffee. Yeah, sure, of course.”

He watches, stupidly fucking enamoured, as Louis’ smile turns softer. “It’s a date.”

\---

They go on three more dates before Louis tells Harry. They both tease Nick endlessly for it, but he reckons it’s worth it, since it lead him to this, watching as Louis tries to finish off another scene, frowning cutely at the screen as he tries to concentrate. His hair is still tousled from them lying in bed together before he jumped up and reached for his phone, saying he had to write something down before he forgot.

“Hey,” Nick says, when Louis finally locks his phone again, “Those knots you were learning. Are they any good for anything besides murdering people?”

Louis rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling when he leans down to press a kiss to Nick’s lips. “Guess we can find out.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> i'm [here](http://clairdeloune.tumblr.com/) if you ever want to talk about louis and nick or just say hi. <3


End file.
